


A Distant and Certain Dream

by TheWillowBends



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:48:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29615220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWillowBends/pseuds/TheWillowBends
Summary: The future is rooted in the past.  For this reason, Link knows not what theirs holds.
Relationships: Link/Zelda (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	A Distant and Certain Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sparky_Lurkdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparky_Lurkdragon/gifts).



Long after the night has fallen over them and the air turned cold, the rain follows them. It lasts until midnight, where the bitter ache of his bones keep him sentry for the long night of their camp. Zelda rests fitfully, turning in her sleep, but it's more peace than she has known for years, and he dares not wake her. His guilt is a relentless beast, one that prowls and twists through the corridors of his mind when he is idle and curls at his feet to look at him with piercing eyes when he dares let his sword rest. The earth still carries the memory of pain; he feels the echo of the world's grief in the wind.

Link rubs his eyes, feeling the fatigue of a night that wears heavy, the ache of old wounds whose pain lingers after healing. Behind him, Zelda twists in her sleep, her breath so quiet he strains to hear them - and strains he does because her dreams are the blood and marrow of his. It is her voice that carried him in the long and lonely hours of a battle that seemed ever at an end, and it is his vision that drives them now, into the world hungry for hope.

He tries to imagine a time when the world will be healed, when the hills and valleys won't hold the scars of great battles, when the air is no longer sullied with poison, when they are more than a scattered people scavenging the bones of a world's remains. He thinks of the Zora, where the rivers still ran clean, and the desert, with its soothing monotony and purifying heat, and the image cannot coalesce in his mind as anything whole, fragmented by loss of a mind that has only known the ruin. The dream of a world restored is Zelda's. He can only hold it in his fist for so long before he clasps too tightly, and it slips through the cracks in his fingers.

When she stirs, he stills, cautious in his regard for her wants. Zelda has spent her life a sacrifice on a great stone slab, waiting for the flash of the ritual knife. The world is always eager to ask more of her; he cannot fashion himself as one to be among their number. So when she comes to sit beside her, he tilts his head at her skeptically, his eyes sharp and knowing.

"You should be sleeping," he says firmly.

"I could not," she admits. In her hands, she fiddles with the gold chain of her necklace. She worries it keenly, this remnant of her past, as if it could be compelled to conjure something more than memory. She is quiet for a long moment, looking with him to a cloudy midnight sky, the stars hidden by the haze of a passing storm.

"I dreamed of my father," she admits after a moment, releasing her necklace to clasp her hands in her lap. When he does not speak, she continues unprompted, "I dreamed of him as I knew him in life, in the grand halls where the throne once stood. I saw him as he was in the prime of his youth when I was but a child, grand and proud." She smiles faintly. "A happier time, before the prophet brought word of the resurrection." 

He looks at her thoughtfully, uncertain of the emotions that wells in him - compassion, yes, but also something more sordid, something with sharp edges that pricks should he grasp it. Envy, perhaps, he wonders, or something darker, more resentful. The cruelty of a life stolen, even as he knows the past exists mainly to cause her pain. Her grief is momentous yet contained, a lake to whose edge he can step but from which he cannot drink. Memory is a stranger to him. The novelty of it is an uncertain weight, as heavy as its absence.

"Did I know him then?" he asks after a moment.

"No," she answers, "you had not come to us yet."

Her feet are bare despite the cold. She wiggles her toes, digging them into the grass and soft earth. Her body still carries the litheness of youth, a countenance girlish and sweet; it remembers youth that she does not, her mind eaten away by years of madness gripped in Calamity's iron fist. He wonders if either of them have ever been children, if they have ever known laughter that came easily.

"Do you miss him?" he asks abruptly.

Zelda tilts her head to look at him, her eyes a blue as dark as the ocean in the dark. For a moment, he thinks he's offended her, but after a moment she smiles faintly. "Sometimes," she says quietly, and it has the color of a secret. "I loved him. He was a good man - but a hard one. He had to be. The world required it."

He nods, looking out in the vast plain, where the night lights up with the gentle glow of fireflies and the distant fire of Death Mountain. He thinks of time, how it shaped him as much as it has the contours of this land, how it continues to shape them. He wonders when the stories are written, will they be grand as the shadows of distant mountains or passing through like rain, a footnote among the pages. A sigh forms on his lips, and he lets it out, forming a moist cloud in the air.

"The Zora have been telling me about my family," he says finally. "My father they knew died in the Calamity. My mother and sister left soon after, and they know not what became of them. Though all these years later, they would have passed."

"I'm sorry," she says, and her tone is genuine, carrying the weight of all their failures.

"You are not the one I expect to answer for it," he tells her gently, and though he is honest, he can see she does not, cannot believe him. Perhaps with time, though he can only hope they are given as much as was stolen from them. He gives her a smile, as faint as the whisper of the night's wind, which she returns with favor.

"I only met your family once," she admits after a moment. "The day you arrived at the castle with your father." She sighs a little. "We were so young, then, to recall it. You could not have been more than fourteen, but the sword had called to you already. I remember you were so quiet, even then. I thought you shy or perhaps reserved, but thinking back on it, I think you were just as frightened as I was. A huge duty had been laid at your feet, as big as my own."

Link tries to imagine himself as a boy, the shape of the fears he held then, an abstract idea of an uncertain battle to come; he wonders whether the knowing and concrete pain of his failure wears heavier. The face he sees in the mirror has it deceptive youth, a certain delicacy that lends itself to a nurturing and condescending regard from those who cannot recognize the weariness in his eyes, who do not see the scars etched in his skin. He wonders if his mother beheld his face now if she would even recognize it.

"The past is uncertain companion," he says eventually.

"So is the future," she answers, and he cannot bring himself to disagree.

He breaks a twig and tosses it into a fire. Its sudden flare lights up in Zelda's eyes, the flames dancing in her pupils. The shadows give her the edges and contours of sculpture, something hewn from stone, sturdy and with heft. Link thinks of all the years and days and hours she spent waiting, the way she hardened her heart against the possibility of a hero that may never come for her. He wonders if the strength that carried her through that time is enough to carry them forward.

"Do you think Impa will have the answers you seek?" he finally asks.

Her face falters, the smile easing to a flat line. It hurts his heart to see it; there has already been so much pain between them.

"I don't know," she admits after a moment, her voice quiet. "I'm not sure there are even answers to be had, but we need to start somewhere. Hyrule deserves a second chance."

He nods. "We owe it to the people to try."

She looks at him curiously, an expression he can't quite read on her face, like a book abruptly closed. They sit with the quiet of the night for a few moments more, before she turns to him more fully, her face reflecting a warmth more common each day the calamity is put behind her. Reaching out a hand, she touches his shoulder, and he twitches at the feel of it, the tension that holds them snapping like the taut string of a tightened bow.

"Does your shoulder bother you?" she asks after a moment.

He blinks, rolling his shoulders a bit, feeling them crack as he does. The storm makes his bones ache, but no more than anything else does. His wounds are deep, but he has learned to value the pain that tells a body it is still living.

"It is only the rain," he says. "It is nothing of so much concern. These things pass."

"They do," she answers softly, "but so does kindness, and the world has far less of that."

His smile is bitter. "That it does."

Zelda shifts, moving to her knees, then moves behind him. He glances at her in confusion until he feels her hands come up to rest on his shoulders tentatively, and he tenses, years removed from any tender touch. She lets them rest there for a moment, letting him feel the heat of her palm warm him skin. His shoulders remain tight; this sort of casual touch is not common between them.

 _But oh, that it could be_ , his mind whispers, full of weariness and longing. Link wonders if she knows how many nights he laid awake, the sound of her voice the only comfort, the only way he knew how to remember hope.

"May I?" she asks, and when he nods slowly, the touch of her hand is so gentle and kind it makes him sigh.

She rubs firm circles around the places where his muscles twinge and bones ache. It a strange thing to let her care for him, a strange thing to be cared for at all. It unbalances something between them, like a face reflected in a rough mirror, familiar yet indistinct, not unpleasant but neither completely comforting. What a pair they make, two incongruent puzzle pieces trying to make a whole: a man who cannot remember the past, and a queen who wishes to forget hers.

"Did you dream in the ether?"

"What do you mean?"

Link stares out into the night, feeling its cold and dark keenly, black magic of the earth. "All of those years your soul was tied to Ganon, as you watched his power slowly expand past the breach, you must have held on to something." He worries his bottom lip with his teeth. "I want to know what it was."

Her hands continue their work, but he can feel the gears of her mind turning in the quiet. It is a long moment before she responds. "I dreamed of the day you would show to the gates with sword in hand. Or with a bow, riding a great horse. I dreamed of a day when Hyrule would be whole again. I dreamed of peace."

His hands tighten around his sword, a spasm running through the palm. "And when the years wore on, and I did not appear, what carried you then?"

"I did not allow a thought, otherwise," she says simply. Her hands move down his back, to the place where the tension knots like rope between his shoulder blades, where he wears the worst of his burden. "Understand that my thoughts were not wholly my own in the seal. To bind a spirit..." A shudder runs through her, fine and brief, but he catches it. "I had not known what it would cost then. I thought only of what must be done, but when you are bound, you are one. I saw what was in him, his plans for Hyrule, and I knew it must be stopped. I dreamed because I had to. It was all I had to keep the nightmares at bay."

Her hands pause on his shoulders, and when he turns to her, her eyes are wide and wild, the dark pupils round as black holes. It is fear, he realizes. The memory of madness that was not hers but found a home in her all the same. Before can stop himself, his hand is clasped around her own, firm and kind; she returns his grip tightly, an anchor for all her grief. He smiles at her sadly, feeling how very small her hands feel in his; how they have carried all of that grief alone, he will never know.

"Link," she says, then stop, her eyes glassy. A fine tremor runs through her hand into his; Link runs a thumb over her hand, soothing her.

"You're safe now," he tells her and means it with his whole being, every muscle that swings the sword and the soul that waited for her voice in the deep well of his lonely silence.

Zelda looks down at her hands, turning them over in his, looking at the way calluses are forming there that they have never known before. She has known hard work, but not like this, building a world up from a grown-over ruin, a little like coaxing life from dry and dusty earth. Now her hands know the heft of the axe and dirt under the nails. Her body knows the ache of muscles worn and tired.

"And you," she says after a moment, "what did you dream of all those years you slumbered?"

Link weighs the truth in his mind, the way it scales against the pain he knows it inspires. He thinks of the gaps in his memory, like the darkness of space between stars, the past that is lost somewhere beyond his reach. In the time he slept, there was nothing; _he_ was nothing. It is only when her voice awakened him, coaxing him out of the dark, that he grew out of his own ruin.

He closes his hands around hers, feeling the warmth in them, the way her pulse thrums in the delicate angle of her wrist. It anchors him to the moment, tethered to her in a way that has damned him as often as it has been his salvation, but he would not sever it, not for the privilege of any freedom beyond her reach. It makes what he says feel like something a little more truth, the bones of something like faith.

"I dreamed of nothing," he says, "but I remembered you. When there was nothing else, I had your voice."

Her hands are shaking when they unclasp from his and then when they move to cup his face, gentle and light as a bird's touch. When she moves toward him, Link feels he has seen this moment before, has known the contours of its shape formed in the eaves of his mind, in the shadows where hope flickered like the pale light of a struggling flame. Pressed this close, it is easy enough to reach out and clasp her to him, whole and warm and steady, more than a dream and greater than memory, to ease her trembling with the strength of his arms as they tighten around her, the way she fits so very well against him, tucked into the space he makes for her.

"All of those years with Ganon," she says heavily, her voice loud in the quiet, "I would never have survived if not for you. If it was my voice that kept you going, it was hope of hearing your answer that carried me." She presses her face against his shoulder, and he feels the wetness of her tears. "I cannot do this alone. I never could."

And it is the promise unspoken that he did not realize had kept him wanting, the one that slept inside all the hollow spaces of the silence between them, the things unsaid. They have been alone so very long, trapped in the prisons time made for them, kept distant by the failures that made them. How he has longed for her in the hours and day and years that have made them, two halves of a whole cleaved apart by a blade that could not sever them from the destiny that awaited them It has taken a long time to come back around to the voice that speaks in the darkness, the one that says _you need not be alone any longer._

"You have me with you always," he promises fiercely, a vow as weighty as any he made on bent knee, and when she sighs against him, full of sorrow and relief, he knows this much is truth. "I wish only to stay by your side, to build the world you dream of. It is _our_ dream now, _our_ future to make."

His grip loosens on her, and slowly she looks up at him, all the trembling parts of her that held when Ganon wanted her to break. It fills his heart with warmth where memory leaves him cold. When she reaches for him again, he does not fight it, even as time seems to skip its rhythm, stuttering past them to leave them this moment. Then her hands are on his face, her eyes are glittering like stars, and the touch of her mouth is so sweet against his, warm and perfect as sunlight or summer's breeze, the moment that has waited for them through darkness and shadow, memory and time.

Outside, it is raining, and the night is long and dark. It does not touch them.


End file.
